The other obvious difference was that the US effort had been primarily directed towards remote viewing — what might be termed psychic spying — while the Russian research seemed to have been offensive. They had experimented with influencing at a distance, trying to get inside the minds of their enemies, studied various types of radiation to manipulate entire populations, and ultimately investigated psychic assassinations. They’d tried methods intended to stop the hearts of their targets; to create blood clots to cause strokes; to rupture capillary vessels inside the brain, and so induce severe depression that might lead to suicide.
Their most ambitious project had been nicknamed ‘Woodpecker’ by American intelligence analysts. Starting in 1976 and continuing until the collapse of the Soviet Union, seven huge radio transmitters based near Kiev, and initially powered by the ill-fated Chernobyl nuclear reactor in the Ukraine, emitted a ten-Hertz pulse at frequencies of between 3.26MHz and 17.54MHz and with an estimated peak power of around fourteen million watts. These signals were beamed directly at the populations of Western Europe, North America, Australia and the Middle East, and were capable of penetrating virtually anything from reinforced concrete bunkers to the huge depth of water above a submerged submarine.
It was the world’s largest ever experiment in psychotronics, using ELF-modulated signals. The Russians had discovered that exposure to certain radiated frequencies could produce effects ranging from depression to aggression. They’d also found that prolonged exposure to such signals could cause permanent changes in the brain, by physically altering the neural connections. An American medical expert later estimated that ‘Woodpecker’ could have caused neurological changes in up to thirty per cent of the target populations.
If the American studies had sounded like science fiction, the Russian experimentation bordered on fantasy. But Richter couldn’t dismiss the money. Between them, the world’s only two superpowers had spent an absolute minimum of a quarter of a billion dollars, over a ten-year period, on investigations into the kind of thing that even the most hysterical and irresponsible elements of the British tabloid press routinely dismissed as nonsense.
The police reached the dockside that afternoon and began questioning the workers.
Once he’d finished interrogating Borisov, Litvinoff had ordered checkpoints to be set up on all the roads between Kondal and Rostov, and telephone enquiries had been made to all trucking companies in the area. The latter course of action produced results almost immediately, when a small transport company in Atkarsk reported that a truck they’d rented to someone called Nabov had been found empty and apparently abandoned in a lorry park just a day later, with the keys still in the ignition.
The company manager assumed Nabov must have changed his mind, and simply had the lorry brought back to his yard. The vehicle was now being pored over by police and forensic scientists.
Luckily for Litvinoff, the company had taken mileage readings both before the truck was driven away, and again after it had been found. This at least told the FSB man exactly how far the vehicle had travelled while still in Nabov’s custody. That provided him with the dimensions of a search area, which included Saratov, while the police and other FSB investigators, hastily called in by Litvinoff to assist in what now amounted to a full-scale inquiry, tried to find whatever alternative form of transport the Americans had decided to use.
The river Volga was an obvious choice, particularly as Borisov claimed that the weapon was hidden inside a large and heavy crate. That meant either another truck or something else big enough to handle it, like a barge or aircraft, for example.
Litvinoff knew that getting the crate onto an aircraft, or even a train, would have meant filling in a whole sheaf of forms, so he guessed that they’d either obtained another lorry, or transferred the cargo to a barge.
It didn’t take the police long to discover that two men, non-Russians but speaking the language fluently, had driven to the port in a lorry. A large wooden crate had been transferred from the back of the vehicle to the cargo hold of a barge waiting to depart for Volgograd.
‘Two men? You’re sure?’ Litvinoff asked the dock worker who had operated the forklift truck.
The man nodded. ‘I didn’t see inside the cab of the truck, but only two men got out,’ he insisted.
Litvinoff made a note to search the main road, and every side road too, between Kondal and Saratov. If only two men had been in the lorry when it arrived, it seemed likely that the pair of Russian technicians had outlived their usefulness. They’d probably been killed by the Americans and their bodies dumped.
He would set the wheels in motion for a search, using the local police force, but for the moment finding the two technicians, whether dead or alive, was of secondary importance. Finding the barge, and the crate it was carrying, was very much his first priority.
Stevenson looked at the five men, stares of disbelief imprinted firmly on their faces.
‘American?’ Westwood echoed.
‘That’s what the techies reported, sir. They’re ninety per cent certain that when Assad made his videotape, there was an American behind the camera. They further deduced that the American speaks, or at least understands, Arabic, because he says “good” immediately after Assad has finished speaking. The logical conclusion is that he was pleased with the boy’s performance, and muttered “good” without thinking. His comment wouldn’t have been audible to anyone else, but the camera’s mike just managed to pick it up. A camcorder’s microphone points forward to record whatever the camera is filming, so it’s not particularly sensitive to noises from behind, unless those sounds are loud or in the very near vicinity. That suggests the American was probably the man filming Assad’s statement.’
Hutchings opened his mouth to speak, but Westwood beat him to it.
‘Why the hell would some American be filming the last words of a Syrian suicide bomber who’s just about to kill himself in support of a political group that’s been effectively non-existent for a quarter of a century?’
‘Sir, I have not the slightest idea, and neither has anyone else. That’s one reason for organizing this operation. The second noteworthy thing about this attack,’ he went on, ‘is that just a week before, a middle-aged Englishman named James Holden walked into the British Embassy in Dubai and described it in considerable detail.
‘He painted a fairly accurate word-picture of Saadallah Assad, and even got his name pretty much right. The only thing he didn’t know was exactly where and when the attack was going to take place. And he said that the reason he didn’t know these two crucial pieces of information was that he had actually dreamt the whole thing.’
‘Bill,’ said Caxton as he strode into Evans’s office, ‘I’ve just heard from Vauxhall Cross. They’re convinced this is a case of mistaken identity, no matter what Mazen’s source claims. The latest intelligence suggests that bin Laden is still holed up somewhere in northern Pakistan, and London simply doesn’t believe he could have got all the way to Bahrain without somebody seeing or hearing something.’
‘So what do they want us to do now? Sit on our arses and pretend that nobody saw anything? We can’t just ignore a report like this, no matter what some geek analyst sitting thousands of miles away at a workstation in London might think.’
‘If you’d just let me finish, Bill,’ Caxton said mildly. ‘Vauxhall Cross don’t want us to investigate — their view is that nobody from this embassy should get involved overtly — but they do want the report followed up.’